Slicing an Apple — How much of an iPhone is made by Samsung? — APPLE doesn't make the iPhone itself. It neither manufactures the components nor assembles them into a finished product. The components come from a variety of suppliers and the assembly is done by Foxconn, a Taiwanese firm, at its plant in Shenzhen, China.

Google Chromebooks molt, grow fresh browser — Two month olds get new lease on life — Google has released a new version of Chrome OS - the browser-based operating system that first arrived less than two months ago - offering VPN hooks, 802.1x secure Wi-Fi , and what the company claims is a 32 per cent faster resume time.

IBM executive says PC era is in its twilight — On the eve of the IBM PC's 30th anniversary, Mark Dean says the PC era is on its last legs. As one of the IBM engineers who helped create the original PC, he is certainly qualified to make this claim.

The Case for Software Patents — It's become popular lately to call for the elimination of software patents. Tim Lee at Forbes sounded the call last month (link), and this week Mark Cuban joined the chorus (link): … I have a ton of respect for many of the people arguing against software patents …

Why Zynga Might Buy Angry Bird's Rovio — Zynga walked away empty-handed last month after bidding unsuccessfully for PopCap, which went to Electronic Arts. — So what's next for the acquisition-hungry company? — What about an even tastier target: Rovio, the Finnish developer of the popular Angry Birds franchise.

Twitter Comes Alive With Realtime Activity Streams — Since its inception, content on Twitter has largely been displayed in the same basic manner. That is a linear, reverse chronological stream of Tweets. Two new sections being added to the service are about to change that.

Today's Weather Channel Forecast: a Chance of Tweets — Twitter has a new way to make money from the online messages known as tweets, courtesy of The Weather Channel. — The online-messaging service on Thursday will begin to give TWC access to users' tweets about local weather, according to the companies.

Apple Closes as the Most Valuable Company in the World — Apple passed ExxonMobil as the most-valuable publicly traded company several times yesterday, but ExxonMobil ended the day ahead of Apple. Both companies' stock prices were down today, but XOM fell quite a bit farther …

Hulu Bids Expected Next Week — Quick update on the Hulu auction: Would-be buyers are expected to offer up their initial bids by the end of next week, according to people familiar with the company. — That will end the first step of a sales process that began in late June …